Thursday, May 21, 2009

I had trouble finding a good online tutorial walking one through all of the steps necessary to set up gpg, set up private/public keys, and use that to communicate securely with a friend. Anyhow the following is a quick tutorial of how to do this on Mac and Linux. If you are on windows try: http://www.gpg4win.org/ and see if you can use my tutorial along with whatever how-to guides they have to get it working.

If both you and your friend are new to Gnu Privacy Guard, then both of you should do the following.

1. install gnu privacy guard:mac: http://macgpg.sourceforge.net/ and download current versionlinux: it may already be installed in your system, on the command line type: gpg and see if anything happens. If not google "install gnu privacy guard [the name of your linux distro]" and there will surely be a tutorial.

On the command line:2. type gpg --gen-key

3. I would select the first option DSA/emgammal or whatever

4. Choose the highest available encryption

5. Follow the rest of the instructions to finish generating a key. Your passphrase should be a longer sentence like "oh no i do not know how to type anymore after that accident"(please not that sentence though) and somehow remember that sentence.

6. type gpg --list-keys

7. You will have something that looks like:pub 1024D/F217E383 2009-05-04uid John St John (my launchpad key) sub ******************************

****** (I blanked out my secret key info)

In the above example, the underlined text portion (F217E383) is my public key's ID. To upload that key to a keyserver so anyone can send you an encrypted file type:

gpg --send-key Your Key ID

8. To get my key so you can send me an encrypted file type in:

gpg --search-keys 'your_friend's_email_address@whatever.com'

and double check with your friend on phone or in person that the key you see is in fact theirs. You can also do the search by name, or probably key ID.

9. Now make a text file say "secret.txt" for example and type whatever message you want in it.

About Me

I am currently an graduate student in the field of computational genomics at the University of California Santa Cruz. I am currently working in Dr. Ed Green's lab on the American Alligator genome, and using comparitive transcriptomics to discover which genes are first triggered by temperature to determine whether the developing alligator embryo ends up male or female.